SŠ Jílová: We Can Finally Show More Than Just Equations and Drawings
The Jílová Secondary Vocational School of Science and Technology in Brno prepares students for future careers in ten different fields, all of which are among the most highly demanded ones today. It offers students superb infrastructure in the form of fully equipped classrooms, after-school clubs, and contacts for 120 partner companies. One of the latest additions to their teaching tools is a pair of TRILAB DeltiX 3D printers.
Here’s how their teacher Bohumil Kašpárek describes the advantages of 3D printing for teaching: “I teach theory subjects—mostly ventilation technologies. Although pictures and blueprints exist for all of the relevant components, these don’t make it completely easy to understand how they work. When I can print out a model of a pipe end or directly show a fan’s cross-section, that’s far more beneficial for my students.”
Meanwhile, in lab exercises, a 3D printer is an irreplaceable aid for work with measuring tools: “When I need to place, say, an anemometer or a barometer into pipework, I can print out a holder in the shape I need in just a short while. In the past we produced these aids using paper, which both looked unprofessional and meant very limited lifetimes.”
The use of a 3D printer doesn’t have to end with just a static model. Thanks to the variety of printable materials and the ease of exchanging them, you can also print working models on DeltiX 3D printers.
“One simply lovely use, for example, is producing a working model of a fan and three different sets of fan blades. In the final product, these have a significant influence on how fast the air flows and on the air’s pressure level within a pipe. So during their exercises, students can measure different blade profiles’ different behaviors directly. And here once again, this is much more fun and useful for them than blackboards full of equations and drawings,” says Kašpárek of this further use.